Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog
"Sometimes I sits and thinks, and then again I just sits"
City living is not just good for the economy, but for the planet. From Matt Power in June ’08 Wired,
A Manhattanite’s carbon footprint is 30 per cent smaller than the average American’s.
I thought of this reading Rural idyll or stuck in the back of beyond, by Rhymer Rigby in this morning’s FT.
From the June edition of Wired,
“What high-speed means of transportation emits less atmospheric carbon than trains, lanes, and automobiles?
The humble counterweight elevator put into service in 1857, which has made vertical density possible from Dubai to Taipei.”
An interesting article by the FT’s Economics Editor, Chris Giles, this morning in which he suggests that ‘the gap between action and sentiment puts the economy at a tipping point’.
Take surveys of households and companies at face value and the economy appears to be in free fall. Most measures of business confidence are sharply down on a year ago and the Gfk/NOP poll of consumers’ confidence about future economic prospects has declined to its lowest level since 1982.
But what households and companies are saying and what they are doing has rarely been so different. For all the misery poured out to pollsters, hard figures so far show people behaving as if they really believe Britain’s economy problems will be short and shallow.
Companies are not yet taking really tough decisions to cut costs. Instead they are keeping their workforce intact, presumably in the belief that it is better to hang on to employees in bad times because the good times will be with us again soon.
An interesting report by Economics Editor Chris Giles in this morning’s FT, that ‘data show that confidence is down but consumer and business behavious tells another story’. He suggests that ‘the gap between action and sentiment puts the economy at a tipping point’.
We are certainly seeing this day to day: work continues, but ask anyone about what happens next and the outlook is decidedly gloomy. At a lavish corporate event last week, to which I took one of my daughters, she was most surprised not by the artwork on display but by, to her, the incongruity of unlimited champagne and the chorus of doom-sayers quaffing it.
There are various steps that we can take in our practices to see us through the slowdown, whether it be long or short. In an email circular last month, Nick Jarrett-Kerr of Kerma Partners, identified “where partners should be spending their time during a market turndown” as
Most partners see fee-earning as their key task, and in most practices this is the case, but, as Jarrett-Kerr notes, ‘the silver lining in the recessional cloud may be that at last the excuses have been removed for partners avoiding to engage in valuable non chargeable work’.
In a recent interview, the managing partner of Bond Pearce, commenting on the announcement of the closure of the firm’s Exeter office, explained
We are committed to the Devon practice. What I would say to them is ‘look at what the clients are saying to us’, which is that they are looking for a different sort of offering from us, which does not require us to be in every city in every part of our region.
So far so good, but these brave words are only a little undermined by the (unconfirmed) report that although Bond Pearce is moving out of Southernhay Gardens, it is still intending to have a “box on the motorway” at Exeter, to see clients, and no doubt to allow its Exeter based partners to avoid having to flog down the A38 everyday.
As the Chief Executive of another Devon firm told me last week, “It’s just a fudge”.
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 